Programming

Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos acknowledged the friction that kept Netflix’s 2019 awards contenders The Irishman and Marriage Story from securing a wide release despite strong creative pedigrees and critical buzz for both titles, but he indicated that it’s a matter of time before the industry adjusts to a new paradigm. After all, he noted, Netflix led the industry in Oscar nominations this year with 24 bids.

Imelda Staunton has been tapped to be the last actress to play Queen Elizabeth II. She will take the crown in the fifth season from Olivia Colman, who, in turn, succeeded Claire Foy.

The series finale of The Good Place Thursday night delivered the show’s best same-day ratings since its season premiere. ABC’s Station 19 cooled some from last week’s series-high premiere but still drew one of the larger audiences of its two season-plus run so far, helping the network lead the night among adults 18-49.

A brewing dispute between Roku and Fox days before the Super Bowl might prove that streamers won’t be able to avoid some of the headaches that are driving them from cable. Roku said its distribution agreement with Fox Corp. is set to expire on tonight (Jan. 31), which would make programming on Fox channels unavailable on the Roku platform.

On the heels of Days of Our Lives‘ official pickup at NBC, CBS has renewed fellow sudser The Young and the Restless for four — count ’em, four — more seasons. The blockbuster deal ensures that daytime’s No. 1 soap will be around through (at least) the 2023-24 TV season.

Fred Silverman, the visionary television producer and executive behind such hit shows as All in the Family, Soap, M*A*S*H and Hill Street Blues, and the first and only executive to creatively run CBS, ABC and NBC, died today. He was 82. Silverman’s uncanny ability not just to identify hit shows in the making but also to program them into memorable primetime nights led Time magazine to crown him “The Man with the Golden Gut.”

Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, who is 67 days away from the launch of the company’s ambitious new streaming service, claimed that the company doesn’t really see the likes of Netflix, Hulu or Disney Plus as rivals.

Criminal Minds delivered season-high ratings for CBS on Wednesday, helped by a stronger than usual lead-in and also likely by NBC giving its Chicago shows the night off. Dueling specials about the British royal family on Fox and ABC drew nearly identical audiences.

Four years after tendering his resignation as Kelly Ripa’s Live co-host, Michael Strahan is setting the record straight about the circumstances surrounding his stormy departure and his rumored rift with Ripa.

The official announcement comes two weeks after NBC Chairman Paul Telegdy at TCA confirmed that the daytime soap will be coming back. “Of course Days of Our Lives is going to carry on. We love it…. I know that will be good news for the fans,” he said then, later confirming that the plan was for the series would stay on NBC, not move to the Peacock streaming service.

Rick Haskins now has oversight of the CW’s branding and marketing efforts and the network’s streaming strategy, programming, distribution and operations. (Photo: Jsquared Photography)

The march to the launch of HBO Max in May is driving changes across WarnerMedia. John Stankey, AT&T chief operating officer and WarnerMedia chairman, told investors on Wednesday that cable powerhouses TNT and TBS will lean into more unscripted programming as WarnerMedia steers its investment in high-end scripted programming to the nascent subscription streaming platform.

The Big 4 networks are using 35-day (and beyond) viewership data to make the case that their shows’ delayed-viewing audience is relevant in the streaming era, even if the loss of “immediate mass reach” complicates the ad-buying process.

CBS’s NCIS drew its biggest same-day audience since the second week of the season, easily topping Tuesday’s total-viewer rankings. NBC’s This Is Us held onto its top rating among adults 18-49, and the series finale of Arrow drew ratings on par with its season average.

For the full week ending Jan. 19 — when very few strips were able to improve thanks in part to preemptions for impeachment proceedings — Hall jumped 10% to a new season-high 1.1 live-plus-same-day national Nielsen rating.

CBS won the week in primetime, averaging 7.2 million viewers. ABC eked out a second place showing, averaging 4 million viewers, while NBC had 3.9 million. Fox had 2.4 million, Univision had 1.5 million, Ion Television had 1.3 million, Telemundo had 1.1 million and the CW had 690,000.

Sony Pictures Television will not bring back rookie talk show, The Mel Robbins Show, for a second season, the company confirmed today. The show will stay in original production through this year as planned and then go off the air once the season concludes in early September.

Although The Bachelor slipped week-to-week, the ABC show still managed to top the TV ratings charts for Monday night. Episode four of the dating show’s 24th season scored a 1.6 rating among adults 18-49 and drew just under 6 million total viewers. That’s down around a quarter million viewers from last episode, but is still a better number than episode 2 put up.

CBS’s streaming service, CBS All Access, credits a trio of high-profile events — including the premiere of its new Star Trek series, Star Trek: Picard, as well as the 62nd annual Grammy Awards, not to mention a busy month of football — with helping it to achieve a new record for subscriber sign-ups in a given month. The company says January 2020 surpassed the service’s previous record in February 2019 for subscriber sign-ups. In addition, last week was the second-best sign-up week ever.